The last post about Josette Molland brings up the interesting question of how an individual ended up belonging to a particular resistance group in the postwar documents that now constitute the documents that historians use to write the history of the war.

This is a different question than how someone joined a resistance group during the war. That was a matter of timing and opportunity. The question of how someone is categorized in the documents is more a question of codification and administration.

The answer actually varies by archive because every archive was compiled by an agency with its own mission. The Dutch Red Cross, for example, interviewed everyone who returned to the Netherlands after the war but not everyone who stayed in the country during the war. The US archives gathered information about resisters who helped downed American airmen but nothing about resisters who worked on underground newspapers in France.

The difficulty for every agency, whether it was the French army or the Red Cross, was that resistance was a dangerous and clandestine endeavor. There were no employment forms or employee lists to consult. Literally anyone could claim to have been in the resistance, and there were social and financial incentives for anyone to do so. Administrators therefore relied on a system in which known resisters vouched for the activities of other resisters. Certain agencies, like the French army, were also able to send the gendarmerie to verify claims, which they did by talking to people in the village.

This caused a problem for the sole survivors of groups who were arrested and either executed or deported during the war. If you are the only person left who knows what you did, there is no one else to corroborate your story and no official network for you to be filed under. Government bureaucracies in particular have no room in their filing cabinets for outlier individuals. Such a person either had to find a network to sponsor them or stay out in the cold, unacknowledged for their role in the resistance.

So although the official lists in the archives are the only documents that historians have and therefore the only ones we can use, they need to be taken with a little bit of skepticism. At least one chef de reseau added individuals to his network who he knew were not part of his network but who had no one else to sponsor them because everyone else in their group was dead. The flip side of this is that a chef de reseau could also refuse to add the name of someone who was part of the network at a remove because the person who the leader knew did not survive the war to identify everyone who had worked with them. Or, without any malice at all, the leader did not add names because he simply did not know them and the person he did know did not survive the war to tell him about them.

Nonetheless, if the person was a bona fide resister who’s just confused about what network they belonged to, there will be documents about that resister in at least one archive. Any claims to resistance that don’t show up in any archive should be taken with a large amount of skepticism.